Anamnesis Journal

But for myself, Gentlemen, I have felt like a navigator on a strange sea, who is out of sight of land, is surprised by night, and has to trust mainly to the rules and instruments of his science for reaching the port. The everlasting mountains, the high majestic cliffs, of the opposite coast, radiant in the sunlight, which are our ordinary guides, fail us in an excursion such as this.1

So John Henry Newman, beginning his last discourse in The Idea of a University (1852), describes the peril of his maiden voyage on the sea of educational theory. “Such,” he adds,

in a measure, has been my feeling in the foregoing inquiry; in which indeed I have been in want neither of authoritative principles nor distinct precedents, but of treatises in extenso on the subject on which I have written.2

That is, he has turned his prow into waters largely uncharted, and the work of coming up with a system and presenting that system attractively has proven quite a challenge. At the time of his lectures in 1852, he had a number of principles he had received from other thinkers at Oriole College, Oxford—the arguments of Copleston and Davison, as we see in Discourse 7; moreover, he had made a study of the history of educational practice, as he demonstrated in The Rise and Progress of Universities (1856); he had, most important of all, decades of experience at Oxford, an extended course of studies in all manner of subjects, a course followed always in community with other students and tutors. But unlike someone writing about, say, ethics or moral theology, physics or ancient history, Newman had no authoritative figure or text to work from in the matter of education—no “everlasting mountains” or “high majestic cliffs” by which to chart his course. The Idea was a night voyage, and Newman was sailing by his own instruments—according to the general principles with which he had already made sense of the rest of the world.

Over the past twenty-five years or so, the fiction of Georgian Flannery O’Connor has enjoyed the widespread critical attention and popular readership that eludes far too many “serious” novelists and story writers.  She is safely ensconced in that pantheon of twentieth century writers whose membership leans heavily towards Southerners and which includes Mississippians William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, Kentuckian Robert Penn Warren, and O’Connor’s fellow Georgian Carson McCullers.  In other words she is among the luminaries of modern American letters whose work has provided the basis for numerous dissertations, classroom discussions, and critical tomes. [1]  A danger exists, however, that O’Connor’s work has been subsumed by academia, when it is the general public who is in greater need of her stories and novels and their vivid depiction of the social and spiritual malaise which currently grip contemporary society.  The following essay attempts, if nothing more, a summation of O’Connor’s thematic/theological concerns and her methods of handling them in fiction.

Authority in the State, which resides in the public authorities, is indispensable because, among other things, citizens may misuse their natural freedom and work against the public purpose.  Therefore, what is needed is a principle of internal unity which obligates the citizens to orderly living together, and which can keep the conduct of the individual in harmony with the purposes of the whole community.

-  Heinrich Pesch1

"If men were angels," wrote James Madison in Federalist no. 51, "no government would be necessary."2  And I suppose that this statement seems self-evident to most Americans today, equally as it seemed self-evident to its original readers.  It is, however, neither obvious nor necessarily true.  In fact, St. Thomas Aquinas did not share that opinion, rather he explicitly defended the opposite view.  The difference of viewpoint here is expressive, I think, of a fundamental difference in approach to the necessity and role of government and even of the nature of man.  So beginning with this seemingly arcane question about angels and men, we can examine two very different ways of looking at government and its place in human society.

This is an addendum-essay that further develops Professor Wilson's "Retelling the Story of Reason" in ANAMNESIS, Volume 1, Number 1, 2011.

In my essay, “Retelling the Story of Reason,” I contended that modern thought routinely sets logos, (reason) in opposition with mythos (story-telling), and favors logos.  This habit breeds an unhappy myth of its own: mankind was once subject to the vague powers of myth, but has emerged triumphant from such antiquated miasma into the knowing precisions of a rational age.  While such a myth gained traction in the modern age, particularly during the Enlightenment, its basic form dates back to Plato.  Or rather, it dates back to a certain reading of Plato.  My essay called that reading into question, returning to some of Plato’s best-known statements on the “ancient quarrel” between poetry and philosophy, in order to show that, for Plato, stories serve as the condition of possibility for reasoning and mythos naturally and properly interweaves with logos.  While Plato certainly distinguishes between the two, his writing provides us ample reason to acknowledge that distinction as subsisting within a natural unity.  If Plato is to be believed, the philosopher must reason both in stories and through them, so that sound reasoning might itself be understood as a kind of story-telling.

“The elements into which all poesy is divided are two…metaphor and meter.” Thus writes Snorri Sturluson in the Prose Edda, a handbook compiled by Snorri for the aid of the Icelandic skalds. Of “skaldic metaphor,” he writes, there are three types: “first, calling everything by its name; the second type is that which is called ‘substitution;’ the third type of metaphor is that which is called ‘periphrasis.’” Offering an example of this last, Snorri writes: “Suppose I take Odin, or Thor, or any of the Aesir or Elves, and to any of them whom I mention, I add the name of a property of some other of the Aesir, or I record certain works of his.  Thereupon he becomes owner of the name…just as when we speak of Victory-Tyr, or Tyr of the Hanged…that then becomes Odin’s name, and we call these periphrastic names.”  So it becomes evident that for Snorri, metaphor, in all of its varieties, is simply a matter of giving the right names to things, and this task of naming he calls one of the two elemental tasks of the poet.  There is a remarkable similarity here between Snorri and Aristotle, for one finds that in the Poetics, metaphor is said to “consist in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else,” and to be a master of metaphor, Aristotle claims, is “the greatest thing by far.”¹